A New Juneteenth: The Liberation of New York Faces
Can We Invoke the Spirit of Liberation to End New York's Eternal Masquerade?
Oh, New Yorkers…land of the brave, home of the perpetually masked.
When the rest of the world dropped their masks faster than a hot potato years ago, the Big Apple kept the masquerade going. Maybe there needs to be a Juneteenth for masked New Yorkers!
For the uninitiated, Juneteenth, celebrated on June 19th, commemorates the emancipation of enslaved African Americans in 1865. It’s a day marked with jubilation and reflection, honoring the end of an appalling era and the birth of newfound freedom.
Now, isn't it high time we bestowed a similar liberation upon New York’s faces? The covid era is long over, but many outside my apartment doors still wear mouth muzzles. It’s the most bizarre thing to see. So many are wearing masks, alone…outside! I still see some in their vehicles, by themselves, masked up.
A Juneteenth for masks? Picture it - a day when New Yorkers collectively cast off the shackles of their face coverings, breathe in the liberty-laden air and go about their business without fogging up their glasses.
It’s time for people here to realize it’s not 2020 anymore. Or 2021. Or 2022. The pandemic “officially” ended on May 11, 2023. So, in the spirit of Juneteenth, let’s consider setting those faces free forever.
Do you still wear a mask? If so, why? When will you take it off?
Clayton is the founder and publisher of the social and political commentary publication Think Things Through. For more, click HERE
Fashion trends are a funny thing, especially the ones that stay trendy long after their value as expressions of individuality (or whatever) has worn off. I mean, here we are in 2023 still thinking we're cool for saying 'cool' to mean whichever more positive than negative adjective is too uncool to articulate instead, when up until, say, seventy years ago or so, to call a person cool meant that they were behaving dismissively or showing indifference, while to call a thing cool made no sense at all unless it was below a certain more expected temperature for some reason.
The fashion trend of openly displaying symbols of (what is supposed to be taken as) prevention of unwellness or preparedness for disaster began long before most of today's Big Apple mask-wearers were even born. The 'natural foods' kick and all its attendant forms (such as, you name it, veganism or shopping at Whole Foods or hanging herbs in one's living room to dry or causing one'e entire house to smell of garlic on opening the front door, etc...) began by my best guess sometime back in the 1970s, when the post-Vietnam protest culture found itself without a cause celebre to unify around, and decided that doctors and junk food were the cause of all human suffering because they represented colonialism, or something. I still wonder how many unsuspecting women read 'Childbirth Without Pain' and found it quite a shock to learn that sitting upright in a room full of crystals and candles and chanting Buddhist slogans didn't do jack-shit to make passing a watermelon through their birth canals any less painful....
But here they still are, wearing those stupid masks not out of any genuine adult conviction that they will do jack-shit to protect themselves or anyone else from a disease scare that was over-rated as soon as it hit the headlines, but because somewhere in the early going of the 'covid' behavioral pandemic that the headlines generated, it became fashionable to wear them as oposed to not wearing them, because it was an election year and one of the candidates was (to say the least) out of favor with the cool protest crowd, and not wearing them might mean that one was in favor of his being re-elected.
Or something.
My brother, as it turns out, was spared the absolute destruction of an actual tornado the other day in his adoptive home town of Tulsa, but by the time his email asking if the same storm had affected me further westward arrived, three days later owing to massive internet and power outages in Tulsa since that day, he was sitting in his house with no power and working on figuring out how much refrigerated food they stood to lose now that all the stores have sold all their generators. He's doing fine, but being prepared or acting preventively had absolutely nothing to do with why. He got lucky is all.
Residents of Perryton, Texas were not so fortunate with the previous storm a few days earlier.
So when I did get hold of him today, we had a conversation about preparedness, given new context by how folks in Perryton had been granted seconds by Mother Nature, not hours or days or years, to prepare themselves for the apocalypse that suddenly appeared in the sky and destroyed their town and injured or killed their neighbors.
All the sirens and shelters and what-to-do tutorials in the world could never have prepared them for what happened. Even the common high-plains practice of getting in the car and driving around instead of awaiting one's doom at home during such storms (to give oneself the comforting feeling of having options in the form of an accelerator beneath one's foot, I gather) was of little use when nature needed only a matter of minutes to transform everyday life into the aftermath of catastrophe. I still don't know if the tanker truck thrown airborne into a pasture had a driver in it that day. If it did, that person certainly was neither prepared for nor able to prevent ending up being thrown about like a rag doll. I just hope he or she is okay.
It occurs to me that no one seems to have confirmed beyond refutation that masks ever had the least thing to do with preventing the spread of a rumored infectious disease, nor if they were of any value at all, in the overall shitstorm of reactive behavior passing as a response which the 'covid' rumors set in motion.
But I don't think that this is even why people ever wore them in the first place, much less why anyone still does (YGBFKM...)
They started out being the cool thing to be seen doing, and now the social prerequisite of not being uncool, and thus a Tr***-supp*****r, is why not wearing them would be too uncool even to contemplate.
It has fuck-all to do with 'covid'. If we're being truthful, it never did.